Heavy metal music sweeping across the Middle East

Acrassicauda is the subject of “Heavy Metal in Baghdad.” They now live in Istanbul.

Metal is not just the torture-music of choice used by rendition-cell operatives, it’s seen by many Islamic clerics and politicians as satanic.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad: ‘our lives are heavy metal’

Telegraph | Sep 6, 2008

Suddenly, the Middle East is alive to the sound of riffs. Sukhdev Sandhu meets the makers of a new film about the phenomenon

The plaintive beauty of Iranian folk. The effervescence of Algerian rai. The street-wise stridency of Palestinian rap. The music of the Middle East is as diverse and eclectic as the region itself.

It’s unlikely, though, that even the most passionate world-music fan has heard Egypt’s Hate Suffocation, Israel’s Orphaned Land, far less Lebanon’s Scrambled Eggs.

All are part of a large and growing subculture of metal bands across the Middle East who play thrash, grindcore, doomy and bowel-churning noise.

Many of them do so at great risk to themselves: metal is not just the torture-music of choice used by rendition-cell operatives, it’s seen by many Islamic clerics and politicians as satanic. In 2003, 14 Casablancan musicians, among them members of Nekros and Infected Brain, were sent to jail in Morocco for moral subversion.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad, a new documentary by Canadian-born Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti, looks at one of the bravest bands of them all: Iraq’s Acrassicauda. Named after the Latin for “black spider”, and inspired by Metallica and Slayer, they struggle to play their impressively dynamic music in a city where bombs rain down and blow up their rehearsal room, and where road checks and tight security make gigging almost impossible. In the end, they’re forced to flee as refugees to Damascus.

Acrassicauda deny that they’re a political band, but in the present situation their hyper-aggressive sound, their decision to sing in English, as well as how they wear their hair and their clothes, can’t help but lend them a radical edge.

“For a long time, especially in England with groups like the Darkness, metal has had a trivialised cultural currency,” says Moretti. “Its gravitas was impinged upon and diminished. But Acrassicauda are artless, plain and very real. I was drawn to the starkness and the impossibility of their situation. They have a level of authenticity unparalleled in the West.”

Metal, with the exception of a handful of bands such as Napalm Death and System of a Down, is not normally seen as a political genre. Compared to punk or to hip-hop, its imagery and lyrics are less rooted in a recognisable social present. Yet, in the context of modern-day Iraq, metal’s lexicon of terror, mayhem and apocalypse has unmistakable resonance. One of the musicians in Alvi and Moretti’s film claims: “We play heavy metal, because our lives are heavy metal.” It’s a sentiment that also appears in Heavy Metal Islam (Three Rivers Press), a newly-published study by musician and Middle East historian Mark Levine.

“Metal reflects schizophrenia: it both sounds like it and is a therapy for it. It’s a way of dealing with mental illness. At the very least, many young people across the Middle East are politically ill. They have no outlet for their dreams and creativity. They think they have two options: to be a Jihadi, or to sell out and become a yuppie.”

Both Levine and Moretti point out that the cost of buying instruments and amplifiers means that metal is currently confined to being a middle-class phenomenon across the Middle East. The bands, some of whom fell in love with the music after watching MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball on satellite television, are often forced to play before segregated crowds.

A female band, the riot-grrl-inspired Mystik Moods who hail from Morocco, face tricky ideological issues as much as they do those around gender: are they willing to be co-opted by the state by performing at a festival held “Under the patronage of His Royal Highness, King Mohammed VI”?

This raises another fascinating question: will Middle Eastern metal bands, if offered financial support by American proponents of international “self power” – as they surely will be in the future – be able to resist and to hold on to their creative independence?

Many bands face more practical issues. Levine, who has put together a compilation of Islamic metal entitled Flowers in the Desert, recalls how difficult it was for him even to get hold of a track by Sajid and Zeeshan, musicians from Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier province: “For months and months they couldn’t send their music to me because the Taliban kept knocking out the energy grid,” he says. “And they’re not allowed to send FedEx packages out of Peshawar. They’re risking a lot of personal freedoms by even trying to do that.”

As for Acrassicauda, Alvi tells me that their fortunes have declined since the film was completed. “They’re now refugees in Turkey. They’re hoping to resettle to America, but they’re stuck in the purgatory of Turkish bureaucracy and UNHCR stipulations. All they want to do is create, but they’ve run out of money and been forced to sell their instruments. Last time I spoke to the lead singer, he said: ‘I’m going cuckoo.’”

‘Heavy Metal in Baghdad’ is released on September 12.

Hear and read more about Middle Eastern metal on Mark Levine’s website: www.meaning.org/hmi-index.html